If we take Indian sources, the northernmost neighbouring tip country for India is Afghanistan. This strip of land, according to Pakistani sources, is the Gilgit-Baltistan province, and this strip of land which touches Afghanistan, according to the Indian perspective, is roughly 100 kms. But there is another country that almost touches the Gilgit-Baltistan region and is almost a neighbour of both India and Pakistan - the Republic of Tajikistan. We never talk about it, but from an Indian perspective, Tajikistan is just 20-30 odd kilometres away from the northernmost tip of Gilgit-Baltistan, making it an 'almost neighbour' of India.
Till the time Tajikistan was part of the Soviet Union, we could also say that the majestic USSR was just 20-30 kms away from the Indian frontier and even before when it was the Russian Empire and India was under British rule, that distance separated India and Russia. But does this even mean anything from the lens of Indian history? Has Tajikistan contributed in anything that shaped India's culture in any way? This post shall brush on this.
The following sources shall rely heavily on the Schwartzberg South Asian Atlas, which mentions the Fergana Valley as Prakanva, which is currently spread around the junction of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan's tri-connection, to the east of Tashkent. The mountains of the Wakhan Corridor were mentioned as Lohitagiri by the same source back in the era of the 6th-5th centuries BC, which itself is sourced from ancient Buddhist knowledge. The same source mentions that around the times of the Mauryan Empire between the 4th to 2nd centuries BC, the tribes around the Pamir Mountains in today's Tajikistan were known as Phrynis, although other sources locate this tribe more towards the east of the Tarim Basin in northwestern China. But the first major empire that spread throughout Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent in ancient times was the Kushan Empire, between the 30th to 4th century AD. For the lack of any accurate source, various historians and creators have sketched out the approximate map of the Kushan Empire that covered today's India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, China, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan. And perhaps, this is where the transition of ancient culture from this region started to infuse into the subcontinent.
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| Buddhist statue at Ajina Tepe Source: Tours to Tajikistan |
Emperor Ashoka started the campaign of spreading Buddhism around the 3rd century BC after incurring the massacre at the Kalinga War in modern-day Odisha. And thus started the spread of Buddhism, starting from Pataliputra (Patna) and adjoining places in modern-day Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and Nepal, and branching out to Gandhara, Bamiyan, Bactria, Sughd (Sodgiana), Tokharistan, Parikana (Fergana), etc. This was the time when most of Central Asia was a Greek state under the slowly emerging Greco-Bactrian Empire, an earlier building block under the gigantic Seleucid Empire. In the ancient Buddhist realm, this land was referred to as the country of Yavanas or a more loose geographical terminology - Uttarpatha. The city of Panjekanth (Panjakent), which is at the border of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan towards the western part of the country, was an important Silk Route site that is the most probable trading point in those days, as there have been excavations of Hindu Gods (mostly variants of Shiva) found in this place. So this can be easily inferred that there was a direct connection between these settlements in the ancient Ashokan era, which gradually increased over the period, preserving the Buddhist-Hindu connection even though the region was being Islamised slowly.
The Buddhist connection with Tajikistan extended to various smaller kingdoms and realms over time. After the fall of the Kushan Empire, an intermediary amalgamation of the rising Sassanians in the West Asian realm took over, called Kushanshahr, stretching from Turkmenistan to the border of the Panj River in the east, brushing over Gilgit-Baltistan, northern Pakistan, and Afghanistan, and northeast Iran. This was soon taken over by the Kidarites, and both these empires had people practising Buddhism and ancient Hinduism along with Zoroastrianism and other animistic religions till the 5th century AD. And in all these periods, the major trading centres with cities of Central Asia, in the Indian realm, were Mathura, Ayodhya (Saket), and Ujjain (Ujjayini), and today's Pakistani cities of Taxila (Taksasila), Peshawar (Purusapura), and Multan (Mulasthanapura). These were connected to ancient Tajik towns of Cyropolis (unclear of its modern location but assumed probably around the northern strip of the country, most likely Khojand), Alexandra Eschate (in the Fergana valley), Panjakent, and various settlements on the Panj River.
Tajikistan was later part of the larger Hephthalite Empire (5th-6th centuries AD), or popularly known as the White Huns, the Turkic Khagnates (6th-8th centuries AD) that populated the entire Steppe lands from Ukraine to Manchuria, with a hybrid ethnic group following several religions— both existing and non-existing in the present scenario. But things escalated quickly with the arrival of Islam as a fresh new religion that would sweep away three continents as soon as it was born in the deserts of Arabia. The Umayyads and Abbasids were the first Islamic regimes to touch Tajikistan between the 7th and 16th centuries, giving birth to Islam in Tajikistan.
As the Islamic sphere reached the Indian subcontinent, some of them were of Tajik origin as well. According to A History of the Tajiks: Iranians of the East, the author Richard Foltz mentions the Ghaznavid Empire ruler Abu al-Qasim Mahmud ibn Sabüktigin, or popularly the Mahmud of Ghazni, as a half-Tajik from his mother’s side. His mother belonged to a wealthy landowning family from Zabulistan, a historical region in the southeast of Iran bordering Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Ghaznavid Empire expanded from the heartland of Iran in the west, to the shores of the Aral Sea in the north, stretching to Punjab, the Gangetic belt, and as far as the shores of Saurashtra and Makran in the far east and south, between 977 and 1186, one of the earliest Islamic empires in the subcontinent. The Ghaznavids appointed several poets at their courts, two of them being of Tajik origin - Abu'l-Hasan Farrukhi (d. 1038) and Abu Najm Manuchehri (d. 1041).
The next empire, the Ghurids, were of Iranian-Tajik origin, who ruled the north Indian belt till 1205, and it was them who established the Persian court culture that would be continued till the end of 1858 under the Mughals. While the political stance on the administration and conquests of the Ghurids and Ghaznavids in India is divided, it's safe to say that both the dynasties did shape Indian history immensely, being the pioneers of Islamic influence in the Indian subcontinent - both in a negative and positive light, the relativity depending on which political lens one is seeing through.
The next mega-conglomeration of Muslim descendants in the subcontinent came from the Mughals, whose founder, Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur, had a deep connection with the Tajiks. Though he was born in Andijan, which is in today's Uzbekistan, the court language of the Fergana Valley at that time was mostly Tajik, among other languages. In fact, Babur had a large army of Tajiks and Tajik-origin soldiers.
Richard Foltz also comments on the irony of Afghans who use Dari as their official language, which is closely associated with Tajik and Persian languages, yet the Tajiks never held court premises as compared to the Afghans in the Indian subcontinent. The post-Mongol vacuum and Uzbek takeover resulted in Central Asia being fragmented into several Khanates that lasted till the Russian forces engulfed them wholly by the 19th century. There were too many of them, but the three that are important from an Indian perspective were Khiva, Bukhara, Badakhshan (not technically a 'Khanate' but more of an Emirate), and Kokand, clubbed together and known as Turkestan. Modern-day Tajikistan shared parts of the Bukhara, Badakhshan, and Kokand Khanates, and except for Badakhshan, the rest of the lot were predominantly Uzbek in ethnicity. Badakhshan was majorly Tajik and much closer to British India than the others.
Cut to the era of the Soviets, Tajiks were given a separate identity in 1924 as the Tajik Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (Tajik ASSR) under the larger Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic (Uzbek SSR), and later in 1929, upgraded to the Tajik SSR. The Pamir mountains were added under the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast, but major Persian-speaking cities were kept in the Uzbek SSR to avoid a Tajik uprising. But economically, the Tajik SSR was the poorest of the lot, and apart from frequent checking on their settlements beyond the Wakhan corridor of Afghanistan, the British didn't engage with them much. Over the period, the Tajik interaction with that of India faded, except that several decades after independence, the Indian Air Force stationed its airbase in Farkhor in the 2000s to keep an eye on Taliban activities in Afghanistan.
Today, Tajikistan ranks among the poorest or least developed nations in Central Asia and is economically dependent more on Russia and China than India. And just by a 15 kms of stretch, it remains almost a neighbour of both India and Pakistan.
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